From Voxels to Polygons

Making of Shamazaar (part1)

Good moon Adelphians,

In this update, Franck shares some of the process of creating the early version of the new Shamazaar region and gives you an exclusive glimpse at the original Voxel data in this making-of video. Enjoy:

Patrick van Dissel: Uhm, they ARE in HD. You have to click on the settings icon and change it ;)
On the other hand, if your highest choice is 360p then I'd suggest some kind of problem on your end? My highest choice on the video above for example is 1080p, just FYI.

Thank you Frank for giveing this insight into your work,
very interresting shader since its not mapping dependent. Quite much geometry used in your ingame tiles, good for vertex paint, didnt expect it, thought its more normal mapping and less geometry. I gues the "cracks" use a special mask for the grass texture to bleed in, but maybe i am wrong? Very nice sculpting work! 3D coat seems a great programm since your not limited with polygon fiddling. Wish you guys really that you can reach your kickstart goal, dont give up!

So very interesting :D Very nice sculpting, and whoa, still amazed that you have the old source code and data files. So often it seems like legacy code is lost to history! I need to tweet about this again... needs more backers!

thanks for this nice video.
Given the information from the video you need a bunch of level designers to do the job, not so many coders or art workers. LDs usually don't cost so much, so in case this campaign fails perhaps you could save some money on the quality of the character models and still be able to do a Reboot for, lets say, 300k?
Perhaps that's worth a thought or two, just my 2 cents...

@Miika. Thanks for the nice comments. We have made some tests with the techniques you describe as well as geometry shaders and compute shaders. In the end it all comes down to how much time (read money) we'll have to utilize those features on a larger scale as we have huge worlds to populate. We'll do our best to impress, and again this prototype map is really just a proof of concept and the end result will be so much better.

Another great update! Thanks for the explanation of the technical stuff. You could've gone even more in-depth regarding how your blend shader works with the heightmaps of the various textures to make sand accumulate in the rock fissures and cracks - no matter though since I deduced how it works from seeing similar shader techniques before. ;)

Question: Are you planning to implement (or have you already implemented) tessellation and displacement in the engine? Parallax occlusion mapping or a similar technique would emphasize the 3D shape of the rocky materials nicely. :)